The big winners on streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services in October wereThe Haunting of Bly Manor,the Gothic romance follow-up to 2018’sThe Haunting of Hill House,and the Canadian sitcomSchitt’s Creek, as per findings provided to Variety by the New York-based analysis firm 7Park Data. The two shows hit #1 and #2 out of a top 10 list, which mostlyconsisted of other Netflix broadcasts.
7Park creates its ratings charts for SVOD based on a panel of 15,000 to 25,000 American households, and ranks shows based upon the activity of members of that panel. The data does come with substantial caveats: it only reflects the non-mobile viewing of American panel members who watched at least two minutes of a program on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, and/or Apple TV+. There area lot of significant shows and servicesthat simply aren’t shown in this dataset. Even so, that does reflect the five largest markets for SVOD, which can still provide useful information about what customers are watching right now.
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In short, it’s Netflix. In addition toHauntingandSchitt’s, the top 10 SVOD programs for October includedthe Adam Sandler seasonal comedyHubie Halloween(#4), the true-crime documentary filmAmerican Murder(#5), Lily Collins’s culture-shock comedyEmily in Paris(#6), and the chess-based coming-of-age storyThe Queen’s Gambit(#8). Interestingly, the only two programs that were on the charts for both September and October wereRatched(#4 and #7, respectively) andSchitt’s Creek(a distant #10 in September, but #2 in October).
Disney+ managed to force its way into the October top 10 with new episodes ofThe Mandalorian,which fetched up at #3, and the seasonal classicThe Nightmare Before Christmas(#10). No other company managed to get anywhere near the top 10 in October, although Amazon Prime’sThe Boysmanaged to hit a #2 spot in September with its new episodes.
Aside from that, though, Netflix ran the tables in both September and October. That might seem like an obvious conclusion, given how often shows or films on Netflix drive a given week’s cultural conversation (i.e.Queen’s Gambitdistracting people from last week’s American election shenanigans), but it’s interesting to see how that actually plays out in the data. A full eight of the top 10 SVOD broadcasts in the U.S. were Netflix shows. They weren’t necessarily Netflixoriginals—Schitt’s Creekin particular is a rebroadcast ofa popular, award-winning Canadian sitcomthat originally aired on the CBC—but it reflects the degree to which every other service in the American market is still basically wading in Netflix’s pool.
In fact, that’s good for another takeaway: Netflix seems to generally expect that users will be coming and going from its service all the time, rather than just letting the subscription rock month to month.
